The two girls could not unlock the door to their father’s home. The girls could not open a window for the medical books leaning against the panes. The girls could neither pry open the bathroom window painted shut nor the cellar door where the carton of bleach and cans of stew were stacked against it. They could not find a ladder to climb to the bedroom window and check on a mahogany bedroom set—this, they knew to be surrounded by trash bags of mother’s clothing that they’d tagged years ago for the Salvation Army. And, hopefully, on the nightstand, there was still a collection of ivory netsuke.

Also, a reclining ivory nude, female, used by nineteenth-century doctors.

The girls wondered what he made of that woman.

•

The doctor’s x-rays captured

miniature binoculars, silver horse-charm, four open safety pins

lodged between tiny ribs.

Each feels like a story’s climax

when the heroine, dropping into a cave,

discovers a treasure at bottom

that cannot be removed unless she answers these three questions:

What is the opposite of “cleave”?

Who savors rampion?

Why not rock an empty chair?

•

How to extract an open safety pin without scarring?

How to save the object without anesthesia?

How to preserve all two thousand foreign bodies?

•

A child crawls on the treacherous floor

appraising every object inside her mouth.

•

Dr. Jackson produced the modern endoscope with the use of hollow tubes and illumination. To see inside. As if he could see the image of the horse-beating that had taken residence inside him like a primal scene, told him where his body began and ended . . .

•

In the Emergency Room, surgeons also remove sex-related objects

from the rectum (the ubiquitous light bulb or hamster)

and from the perineum (straight pins and nails)

and from the penis (rose stem with thorns).

There’s also the stripper flashing a razor in and out of her labia.

Alas, my imagination pales—

•

Newly coined terms—

Amylophagia, ingesting laundry starch

Cautopyreiophagia, ingesting burnt matches

Geomelophagia, raw potatoes

—all exemplifying specialized terms

within Pica, a disorder named after the Eurasian magpie pica pica,

known for its morbid craving.

(What does one turn to

when laundry starch, say, becomes no more—?)

•

Flashlight, trombone cleaner,

curling iron, screw, battery: all up the bum!

•